Privacy Policy

EFFECTIVE DATE: July 11, 2018

This privacy policy outlines what information we collect, how we secure it, and how we use it in relation to the service AcuityAds provides to its customers.

WHO WE ARE

AcuityAds (“AcuityAds” “we” “our”) is a leading advertising company that provides a technology platform (the “Platform”) that provides marketers a more powerful and holistic solution for digital advertising across all ad formats and devices to amplify reach and Share of Attention® throughout the customer journey. AcuityAds has developed a proprietary technology platform that enables marketers and agencies to effectively target consumers with digital advertising. Most of the internet is offered to users free of charge. Web publishers are able to offer valuable content for free because they are supported by advertising. AcuityAds aims to create a better digital experience for web users by allowing advertisers to present relevant advertising content, rather than advertising that is unrelated to users’ interests. Advertisers also benefit because targeted advertising is more effective and better received.

We offer this privacy policy (the “Policy”) because we take your privacy seriously. This Policy outlines our privacy practices with respect to the Acuity Platform as well as our corporate website at https://www.acuityads.com/ (the “Website”) as well as the types of information we collect from our advertising clients (our “Clients”).

We are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and adhere to its Codes of Conduct, as well as the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) and the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada’s (DAAC) Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising. We continuously improve our privacy safeguards in order to help protect information about your browsing activities.

OVERVIEW OF THE TYPES OF DATA COLLECTED BY ACUITYADS

Personal Data

AcuityAds collects personal data in the course of our business. The definitions of personal data vary depending on the laws where you are located. For example, in the European Union (EU) and Canada, personal data is defined more broadly than in other places, and would include both PII and Pseudonymous Identifiers (defined below). AcuityAds will explain the different types of personal data below, and will try to be clear when we’re describing our use of each throughout this Policy.

Personally Identifiable Information

AcuityAds collects personally identifiable information (“PII”) when you choose to provide it to us. PII is any information that specifically identifies or locates a particular person or entity. We receive and store any PII you provide to us. The types of PII collected may include your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address. For example, you may choose to send PII about yourself in an email, by completing an online form on our Website, or by signing up for our service or e-newsletter. You may also provide us with PII as a Client in order to setup an account with us, to login to access reports or to facilitate billing. AcuityAds uses this information for our reasonable business purposes, including to contact you to respond to your inquiry, to provide the service requested or to maintain your account with us.

Pseudonymous Identifiers

AcuityAds also collects pseudonymous identifiers. Pseudonymous Identifiers help our Platform recognize a particular browser or device, but it doesn’t enable us to know your identity as a natural person. This information helps us collect and make use of other personal data to better understand your interests and preferences. The pseudonymous identifiers include Google Advertising ID, Apple Identifier for Advertisers, and IP address.

PRIVACY PRACTICES FOR OUR WEBSITE

AcuityAds collects PII from our Website when you choose to provide it to us. For example, you may choose to send PII about yourself in an email, or by completing a form on the Website. AcuityAds uses this information only to contact you to respond to your inquiry. Once collected, AcuityAds will store your PII for a reasonable time for record keeping purposes.

AcuityAds also collects Pseudonymous Identifiers from visitors to this Website such as a cookie ID and IP address. We also collect information about the pages viewed on the Website, your browser type, Internet Service Provider, domain name, the time/date of your visit to this Website, the referring URL and your computer’s operating system.

AcuityAds and our partners use cookies or similar technologies to analyze trends, administer the Website, and track users’ movements around the website. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. For more information about cookies, please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/cookies/.

PRIVACY PRACTICES FOR OUR TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM

The Acuity Platform processes data collected across non-affiliated websites and mobile applications pursuant to serving advertisements on behalf of our Clients who are generally businesses seeking to market a product or service. We obtain information using one or more of the following tracking techniques or technologies, which are all widely used across the Internet:

Cookies

A cookie is a small data file stored on your device. In the contact of our Platform the AcuityAds cookie often contains a Pseudonymous Identifier that is assigned to your browser the first time it is seen by our Platform. On subsequent interactions with our Platform, we use this Pseudonymous Identifier to, among other things, recognize what advertisements your browser has interacted with previously. Our cookies are not used to identify you personally, cannot be used to install malware, viruses or any other harmful software and they cannot access any confidential data on your computer. For more information about cookies in general, please visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/.

Pixels

Pixels (also known as web beacons) are tiny images embedded in a web page that allow our Platform to infer that you’ve seen that web page. They also allow us to create, update and read our own cookies.

Advertising IDs

An Advertising ID (device identification) is another Pseudonymous Identifier associated with a smartphone or similar handheld device. Advertising IDs are accessible by mobile application publishers and can be passed to AcuityAds with an ad request. These Advertising IDs do not enable AcuityAds to identify individuals, but rather can be used for certain advertising purposes. They can be used to limit the number of times a specific advertisement is presented to the same device, track a device to show that the device interacted with an ad (i.e. “clicked” on it, watched a video ad, or downloaded an application as a result of an advertisement).

THE INFORMATION WE COLLECT VIA THE PLATFORM

Using the technologies described above, we collect and use Pseudonymous Identifiers. Pseudonymous Identifiers are considered personal data in some places like the EU and Canada but they do not allow us to identify you personally. Their primary use for AcuityAds to help us serve users more relevant ads, count the number of ads served and to understand how you and other Internet users interact with ads. This information is collected when you visit the website or mobile application where one of our ads are served. In additional to the Pseudonymous Identifiers, the Platform collects information about your browser type, information about your operating system, device, and the unique identifier assigned to your device. In addition, we collect information about your web browsing and app usage, such as the date and time you visited one of our partner’s websites or apps, pages of such websites or apps that you visit, the names or types of mobile app that you visit, and other data such as page visits, ads shown, ads clicked and conversions. The collection and use of data over multiple non-affiliated websites and mobile apps for the purpose of creating interest segments to tailor advertising and content is sometimes referred to as “Interest Based Advertising” or “IBA.” We engage in IBA via the Platform. Where we are able to infer within a reasonable probability that a particular computer or device belongs to the same user or household as another computer or device, we may link those computers and/or devices with each other. Where we are able to make such inferences, we may use this information to deliver targeted ads across multiple computers or devices. This is sometimes referred to as cross-device advertising, and we generally don’t conduct cross-device advertising on computers or devices located in the EU. We also use other targeting techniques such as leveraging data received by Clients once it is rendered pseudonymous via a privacy-safe third-party service provider.

We do not use the Platform to collect PII such as your name, postal address, phone number, or email address. And we don’t collect sensitive information such as social security number or credit card number via the Platform. The data we collect is primarily used to understand your online activity and consequentially provide you with relevant advertisements based on the websites you’ve visited, mobile applications you’ve used and similar data provided by our Clients and third-party data partners.

The information we collect is used to deliver personalized advertisements and to measure the effectiveness of the ads.

AcuityAds may also collect data that can be used by our Clients and partners and receive certain data from Clients and partners. This data may include whether or not you have visited our Client’s website and/or mobile app, or if you have used a website and/or app that our Client advertises on. The data collected is used to build a consumer profile. We use the data in our algorithm to better understand your interactions online and to pair the right advertisements with the right consumers. With this information we can deliver you more personalized advertisements.

AcuityAds does not intentionally or knowingly collect information from children under 16 years of age, and does not tailor any segments to children under 16 years of age.

We do not collect any information regarding specific health conditions that we consider sensitive. For a full list of AcuityAds’ proprietary health-related segments, click here. AcuityAds may also utilize health-related targeting data segments provided by third party data companies, but don’t consider any of those segments to be sensitive. We don’t currently use such third party data when serving ads to EU data subjects.

DATA RETENTION

AcuityAds retains the web log data for a maximum of 3 months, although we generally don’t retain this data for EU data subjects for more than a few days. After 3 months, we aggregate the log data so that it does not identify any individual device and retain the aggregate data for up to three years. Our cookies are set to expire before one year; this expiration date updates every time you encounter our server.

SECURITY

AcuityAds takes reasonable measures to help protect the information we collect from loss, theft, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction. This includes but is not limited to the use of firewalls and encryption. No method of transmission over the Internet or method of electronic storage is 100% secure; therefore, while the company strives to use commercially acceptable means to protect your information, it cannot guarantee absolute security.

CHOICE MECHANISM: OBJECTING TO PROCESSING, OPTING OUT

Many Internet users enjoy receiving relevant advertisements. Our algorithm reads your online data and aims to deliver you the most relevant advertising content available. This results in you only seeing ads that match your inferred interests. Without targeted advertising, marketers do not know your consumer preferences and will likely deliver you ads that you are uninterested in.

It is also important to consider that the websites you use receive substantial payments from marketers to present interest based ads. These increased revenues can improve website content and pass on a reciprocal benefit to you, as the user. Without these revenue websites are more likely to deliver lesser value content. AcuityAds has evaluated the benefits of the targeted ads served by our platform against the potential risks to data protection rights and concluded that it is in our legitimate interest to process data via the Platform.

BROWSER BASED CHOICE MECHANISMS

If you prefer not to receive targeted advertising from AcuityAds, you can object to our processing of browser data by the Platform by clicking here, by visiting the NAI website here, by going to the DAA website here or the DAAC website here. If you opt out from that processing, AcuityAds will set a cookie on your browser that tells AcuityAds not to tailor ads to your interests – including IBA ads and cross-device ads. Opting out does not mean you will not be served an ad by AcuityAds, but the ads we serve will be less relevant to your interests. Please note that the opt-out cookie only applies to the computer and browser where it is set. Also, if you delete the opt-out cookie (such as by clearing all cookies on your browser), you will need to renew your opt-out choice. EU data subjects receive additional rights as described below.

MOBILE CHOICE MECHANISM

Opting out on a mobile device:
If you are using a mobile device and would like to opt out of interest-based advertising then please follow this link for instructions on how to opt out across multiple mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android. Please note that the opt out process is different for each mobile operating system.

If you reject processing via one of these methods, one of the mobile operating systems will set a cookie on your browser that tells AcuityAds not to tailor ads to your interests – including IBA ads and cross-device ads. Opting out does not mean you will not be served an ad by AcuityAds, but the ads we serve will be less relevant to your interests. EU data subjects receive additional rights as described below.

DISCLOSURE, ONWARD TRANSFER

AcuityAds may share data that has been aggregated across many users. We may also share pseudonymous data collected by the Platform with advertising clients, but we will only share data related to the advertiser’s own campaigns. We contract with a select group of third-party processers and service providers such as networking and storage providers to allow them to carry out their services for us. Those processors and service providers are contractually obligated to process data only as instructed by AcuityAds.

Please take note of the following exceptional situations: AcuityAds may be required to disclose information to third parties when obligated to do so by law and in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding suspected, or actual prohibited activities, including transfer reasonably intended to meet national security or law enforcement requirements, or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, including but not limited to fraud and situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person. In the event that AcuityAds sells, merges or transfers all or part of its business, we may transfer visitor information to a third party as part of that transaction.

DO NOT TRACK

A number of industry groups are attempting to develop a Do Not Track (DNT) standard. Currently, the standards regarding the DNT signals and appropriate responses are not defined. Accordingly, we do not assign a meaning to DNT signals.

ACCESSING, CHANGING, REMOVING INFORMATION

If you believe we have PII about you (e.g., because you’re a current or former Client, or you provided PII to receive AcuityAds’ e-newsletters) and you would like to change, suppress or otherwise limit our use of that PII, you may contact us by sending an email containing your request to privacy@acuityads.com. For your protection, we will only implement such requests with respect to the PII associated with the particular email address that you use to send us your request, and we may need to verify your identity and/or obtain more information from you before implementing your request. If you’re located in the EU, scroll down to see any additional rights you may have.

EUROPEAN UNION DATA SUBJECTS

The General Data Privacy Regulation (“GDPR”) affords additional rights to EU data subjects. Those rights include the right to complain to EU Supervisory Authorities and the right to access, correct and delete certain personal data processed by AcuityAds.

As described above, with respect to EU data subjects, personal data includes Pseudonymous Identifiers such as an IP address, a mobile advertising ID or a cookie ID. Where AcuityAds is a controller of data (e.g., via our Platform), the legal basis will be both legitimate interest and consent in accordance with Article 6 of the GDPR anddepending on the type of information subject to processing and the information we receive from upstream partners. Where we rely upon legitimate interest, we have assessed the processing is not high risk and will not violate fundamental human rights. For example, we believe that the processing undertaken by our Platform for delivering ads is not high risk and may be without our legitimate interests. We process personal data of clients and partners for the performance of our contracts with them in accordance with Article 6 of the GDPR.

Where AcuityAds receives from an EU data subject a request to cease processing of data via one of the choice mechanisms listed above, AcuityAds will stop all data processing with respect to the opted out browser or device unless such processing is required by law.

If you believe AcuityAds is processing one of your Pseudonymous Identifiers and wish to exercise your right to access, delete, port or remove such information, please click here to visit our EU data subject access request page.

If you have a particularly sensitive request, please contact our data protection officer by postal mail, as communication by e-mail can always be flawed by security vulnerabilities.

REVISIONS

AcuityAds reserves the right to revise its policies and practices periodically. If you would like to keep up to date, please visit this page to find out about any changes. We will post any updates as well as their effective dates on this webpage.

CONTACTING US

If you have any questions about our privacy policy, please contact us: